Moscow rebuffs Duma election observers
State of democracy in Russia: Election official says OSCE cannot send as many observers to the upcoming parliamentary election as they want.
The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has published their pre-election report based on an election expert visit to Moscow. The report raises several critical questions to the state of democracy in Russia.
The tension between OSCE and Russia regarding observers to Duma elections is not new. Before the 2007 election, the organization said a dearth of foreign observers in addition to harassment of opposition forces undermined the results of the election. The quarrel ended with an OSCE decision to send no observers at all.
For the December parliamentary election OSCE says they will need to send 260 observers. Moscow says that is too many.
Head of Russia’s election commission Vladimir Churov was asked by Interfax whether he thought 260 observers were too many and replied “Definitely” without stating what the amount of observers should be.
Head of the OSCE delegation Jens Eschenbaecher says to The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that 260 observers is the minimum needed to monitor a statistically relevant number of polling stations during the Duma election in December.
- It is not a situation where we put on the table a certain figure and start bargaining, Jens Eschenbaecher says.
There will be 95.000 polling stations for the Duma election.
In the 2007 election, a delegation from the parliamentary assembly of OSCE concluded that the elections “were not fair and failed to meet many OSCE and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections.”
